Category: Broken Girl Media

Film, Television, Radio, and Gaming

The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon

Dear god, I’ve found it. After all these years and all my haunted dreams, I’ve found it. The document at the heart of my destruction.

I had a soul as a boy, before I watched The Amazing Cosmic Awareness of Duffy Moon. I’m sure of it. I have no proof save my long-dried tears, but I am certain.

They showed this to me. Do you realize? The television people. They showed this. To all of us. We were children. I know now what I could only guess then, that there are hells beyond human ken, and so my last hope —as I teeter here upon my sanity’s fine edge— is that the monsters responsible for this Afterschool Atrocity have each found diverse damnations in which to churn.

So many years, so many decades. Trying to drown Him out, to quiet the memory of His eldritch assertions, to wash from my recollection all trace of the words that He burned into my rotting heart. Even now, I tremble to transcribe the terror.

“You can do it, Duffy Moon.”

This world is His, and I am lost.

Stuff I’m Watching

  • Upstart Crow: My new Favorite Thing; thank you, British Television Industry, for giving me this gift. A winking, retro-sitcom reimagining of Shakespeare’s life, it turns Will into a harried-but-dedicated family man with a horrible London-to-Stratford commute, Christopher Marlow into a gregarious, talentless, heterosexual rake who occasionally rips off Will’s work, and Robert Green into a high-born, officious, Elizabethan derivative of Sallieri from Amadeus. If you’re aware of how absurd those characterizations are, then you’re well on your way to enjoying what’s on offer. It doesn’t hurt that UC features more historical misogyny jokes per minute than anything this side of Boardwalk Empire, and casts Yara Greyjoy from Game of Thrones as a wannabe actress who’s sort of a proto-Kimmy Schmidt/Sue Heck, on an endless, fruitless quest to be the first actual girl to play a girl on the English stage.
  • The Orville: This show confuses me. With every episode, I expect it to dissolve into a mess of repurposed Family Guy dick jokes or Spaceballs-esque satire… but it never does. Its biggest sin turns out to be a fondness for awkwardly anachronistic pop culture references; the rest of the time, it sticks to being a quirky, utterly sincere piece of upbeat space fantasy. It’s Doctor Who in Star Trek: The Next Generation drag, which turns out to be a rather nice thing.
  • Channel Zero: I admire CZ’s willingness to take itself seriously; in contrast to the regurgitated Kevin Williamson-isms of pop-junk like American Horror Story, it never deflates its own atmosphere with unnecessary, self-aware comedy. And they make excellent use of an obviously minuscule budget, with the mundane, flatly-lit settings and deliberately underplayed performances contributing to a constant level of unease and dread. The first season is creepier, but the second is more coherent.
  • Stranger Things 2: Well, that was more of that thing I liked.
  • Fear the Walking Dead: With this season’s relentless pruning of the core cast, and a delightful mini-Deadwood reunion giving it a little extra spark, I’m actually enjoying Fear more than the original show at this point. Where TWD’s Rick, Negan, and Ezekiel stand around giving speeches and launching wars, Fear’s Madison continues to smoothly alternate between shrewd emotional manipulation and brief, purposeful bursts of murderous violence in her efforts to Get Shit Done. Her ice-cold competence is a nice change of pace in this particular zombie apocalypse.
  • Star Trek: Discovery: The first two eps were very strong, with a completely unexpected shift in the status quo making a case for Discovery as a New Thing in the Trek universe. To my frustration, it doesn’t maintain that inventive energy throughout the run, with a couple episodes (the ones featuring Rainn Wilson, sadly) sagging into mediocrity. Sonequa Martin-Green’s stoic lead performance is fine, but Jason Isaacs steals every scene he’s in with a character that is basically a morally-modulated version of Hap from The OA. I’m optimistic that they’re going somewhere promising, but I’m still not completely sold.
  • Love: As much as I enjoyed Community, I really didn’t like Britta. I know she was kind of unlikable-by-design, but the result was that I dismissed Gillian Jacobs as an actor. Love proves that I was wrong to do so; I am now deeply in love with her.
  • Rick and Morty: For the good of everyone, the first episode should be banished from existence. I watched it ages ago, and was so turned off that it took four years for me to finally give the show another chance. I still don’t find belching and phlegm to be the comedy gold that Dan Harmon and company seem to believe, but there’s a huge leap in quality between the first and subsequent episodes. So okay, I kind of get it now.
  • The Punisher: We’ve only watched the first couple installments, but so far, I have no idea why this thing is getting so much critical shit. Barring as-yet-unseen narrative disasters or production failures, The Punisher is already better than Iron Fist and The Defenders. Yeah, it’s a little disorienting, seeing fucking Desi from Girls playing Micro, but my only complaint is the Netflix Universe’s insistence on wedging an increasingly boring Karen Page into the cast; Frank doesn’t need a will-they-won’t-they romantic subplot, so I hope that shit stops soon.

A Modest Suggestion

 Y’know, if you really wanted to stick it to someone like Bill Cosby, all you’d need to do is make sure that all news articles and think-pieces about him first refer to him as “Bill Cosby (writer/star of *Leonard Part 6*)”. So if you’re writing about his life, you could introduce the subject with something like “Bill Cosby (writer/star of *Leonard Part 6*) has been accused of sexual assault by over 50 women…”

See, he doesn’t care about the women or the accusations; he long ago rationalized them away. He’s never going to jail, he’s never going to be poor again, and the sand in his life’s hourglass is rapidly trickling down. You can’t hurt him with crimes and misdemeanors.

But if you could ensure that every published mention of him included a reference to his greatest professional failure? *That* would hit him where he lives. For generations to come, the work most associated with him —the one referenced in every internet search result for his name— would be the most worthless and humiliating. Not the Noah and the Ark bit, not “Dad is great, he gave us chocolate cake”, not *Fat Albert*, not *The Cosby Show*… *LP6*, baby.

Plus it’s probably not appropriate to bring up serial rape in every context, but you can freely mock and belittle *Leonard Part 6* in front of the smallest children in the strictest of churches.

Just a thought…

The problem with being the perfect man for your time is that your time can end long before you do. At 91, Hef was past perfect.

But for the twenty years of his prime, he filled a lustful, thoughtful, man-shaped hole in the American tapestry. He edited more than a magazine; he edited the national image of manhood, exposing his audience to the literature, art, and ideas that intrigued him, as well as the big titties that got him hard. Without firing a shot or winning a contest, he pushed a generation of men to be more interesting versions of themselves; that he didn’t really succeed is less an indictment of his vision than the nature of the generation he sought to inspire.

I missed Hugh Hefner before he was gone. His death simply means that I get to miss him out loud.

I don’t consider myself a “zombie fan”; I’m into the dystopian post-apocalyptic scenarios that zombies create, rather than the dead themselves. And despite the occasional request I’ve received for Walking Dead fanfic, I’ve never really thought zombies were relevant to this blog.

But we recently began watching iZombie —which is everything that made Buffy great with none of the crap, plus Rose McIver is the prettiest, funniest little thing in the world— and it prodded me to recall a couple movies that probably do merit a mention here.

First is Deadgirl, which is… well, let’s just cut to the chase. It isn’t a particularly good movie, but it definitely has a clear-eyed view of what would happen if an average teenage boy —that most depraved of all creatures— found a sexy, naked zombie strapped to a table in an abandoned basement. Wikipedia calls it a “black comedy horror”, but I don’t recall laughing; my response was more a combo platter of morbid curiosity, reluctant titillation, ethical perturbation, and a moment or two of stomach-churning disgust. It left an impression, to say the least.

The second is Make-out With Violence, which enters the same territory as Deadgirl —boy finds bound, beautiful zombie— and then veers off in a more creepily thoughtful direction. It’s pretty much Peak Mumblecore —don’t expect vibrant performances— but it’s pleasantly photographed, and it does an amazing job of capturing the vibe of a hazy suburban summer and the associated existential despair. Where Deadgirl is all about boys and the gross things they do with their dicks, M-OWV is about romantic entitlement: that feeling that the universe owes you the happy ending of your choice, and anything done in pursuit of it is justified. It’s an above-average indie, and worth tracking down, if you can.

I meant to post something about this a couple years ago, and just never got around to it.

Sam Barlow’s Her Story is great, in precisely the sort of way you little freaks should enjoy. While its content is constrained by the family-friendly requirements of the App Store, it still manages to deal with creepy sexuality and psychological damage in ways that I found fascinating.

The acting is well above-average, the writing better still, and the crazy recreation of an early ‘90s computer UI is delightful to those of a certain age. It’s also on sale right now, which is why I bring it up… it’s worth the full price, and a steal at $2.99.